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Festus above quoted,s. relating to the Arx and the saua Idulia.
is an explanation of the name Sacra Via and the mention of the
day and festival is incomplete and subordinate, it cannot well have
been transferred from Verrius' work on the calendar; but
although notes in the Praenestini pertaining to the Ides have been
lost, the poet must either have read a note in Verrius' book of
Fasti to the effect that on the Ides a sheep was offered to Jupiter
on the Arx, or else he derived his information from Varro and
read perhaps something to this effect: I dibus flamen Dialis in arce
Iovi vervecem immolat. At any rate, being a poet and storyteller
rather than a scholar, he seems undoubtedly to have
bestowed but a superficial reading on his learned authority, and
seeing the word arx, to have understood it in the loose, general
application to the entire hill, so often given it,8G the thought of the
Capitolium and temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, however,
being more prominent in his mind, as in his own lines from
Tristia (IV, 2,55-56), already quoted. s6 He has thus made the
mistake of assigning to the great political Jupiter of the Capitoline
temple a sacrifice made out of doors on the Arx to the primitive
weather-god, and has even gone so far as to record the offering
as taking place in aede, when we know that sacrifices in the
cella or the portico were extremely rare and that the usual
custom in temple cults was to burn the exta on an altar on or
before the steps of the podium.
.. p. 290 (Muller's edition) .
.. See above: Tibullus II,S, 25; Ov. F. VI, 367; Liv. I, 12, 22; XXVIII,
39, 15.
.. See above, and d. also n. 71.